Thursday, May 8, 2014

Numino Street (A Prologue to a Book I Ought Not Be Working On)

Prologue—Numino Street

The City
of New South Satar was the pride of the Empire. The Crown of the Expansion.
Emperor Arulo III himself had taken to calling it his “Favorite Son,” much to
the chagrin of his own children. Seated amidst the great flatlands where the
sands became grasses, and the great forehead of land creased into anxious
hills, enthroned upon the ruin of what was once an old northern outpost, the
city would be the greatest ever built by men, said to rival even the Golden
City of the Elves (though those who said it had never seen the city in question
with their own eyes).

Some said
that it would be even greater than the City of Kings itself, with a temple even
to outshine Arulo’s palace. But when they did, they were sure to say it in
whispers. It was widely known that Sursaku, High Priest to the Order of Unashka,
was personally overseeing the construction of the temple, and beside him was
the Emperor’s most powerful General, Coras Hadun, both reigning with iron
fists. Thousands of slaves had been dragged from the battlefronts in the north
and the east and lashed to chains in the quarries. They swung picks; they
hauled stones; they died; they were replaced. In the loudest voices, on every
front, it was proclaimed that this city would be the greatest ever built.

Already,
towers were rising from the darkness. Streets of chipped stones had been ground
to dust beneath bare feet. Walls, fifty paces deep, were heaving themselves
towards the stars, dragged upward by the weight of the corpses who had died to
make them.

The
bodies had been laid into the walls. Their souls had been poured into the
foundations. “Lives to strengthen the mortar; chains fashioned from the
unblessed spirits to keep our enemies away,” So had said the priests, and
nobody argued with the priests. In a year, more had been accomplished than
anyone had expected.

Overhead,
the moon whirring in endless battery, the spires ascended, crawling like some
great titans out of the very earth, dark and lumbering, black against the
stars. The streets rolled out like carpets. Carpets with bodies swept away
beneath them. The seething winds broke against the walls, and left the streets breezeless.
Barren. Scented with sweat and dust, painted in pale moonlight.

A single
road, cobbled and winding narrowly through the buildings, had been named Numino Street. As the pendulum of time
spun on, no one knew who Numino was, or why the street was named for him, and
nobody really seemed to care, anymore. Because the street had another name, now:
Kunroc. Demon Street.

There
were two kinds of people who ventured to cross Demon-Street, at night:

Those who
didn’t believe in demons.

Those who
were not afraid of them.

The
streets were almost always empty. But those who did go there—and those who
frequented them, for whatever reason—could, and had been known to tell what few
other men knew, when the night grew thick and the fires burned hot, in taverns
or the still watch hours:

High up
on that cobbled hill, there was a tree. Not like those little garden shrubs and
bushes and sprouts of ivy on the rooftops, wrapped and combed and trimmed. Not
potted. This was a tree.

Roots dug
deeper into the ground than even the founders of the city had dreamed of
clawing, deeper than the foundations and the secret passages of Sursaku.

Fingers
reached higher, blotting and gouging at the sky and its twinkling eyes,
reaching for the light. It had stood for two hundred years, nearly (or the
stories of it had). Swelling and erupting with power, twisting itself higher,
sinews straining and flexing to grow even more. And the stories agree. The tree
breathed.

They
could feel the tautening and loosening of breath, captured and escaping like a
tide. A breath that swept through from no direction and all of them, simply
there and gone, scattering hair and thoughts and words and stealing them away
them.

The taste
of the wind was the taste of agony. Anguish was its language and anger and
sorrow were the words it spoke, as the tree grew. But no one could hear those
words. Indeed, though the roots spread through streets and crawled up walls, no
one could see the tree. Nor could they hear the creak of the wind through its
branches. But some, when the moon hung right, as it had on that night,
centuries ago, could feel it.

And the
feeling resonated with a toll like madness and a torrent of tears. Those who
stood on the right stones, and breathed in the wind as it splashed through the
buildings, could sense its stab in their bones and roar in their stomach. A
pain, rising in the chest, the pain of a broken heart and crumpled soul. It was
a knife in the wind.

When all
was aligned, the stars and the moon and the wind, some could hear the words in
the air. The voice of a girl. An antiquated memory, a ghostly haunting, never
allowed to sleep in the mortar, like so many others had.

The
stones could not sense her voice; but the little scrubs of grass tingled, like
the hair on the back of the neck. The stars themselves seemed to lean in to
hear. Two speakers, two voices, but one set of footsteps. Some had stood and
listened to those voices for hours, from the set to the rising of the sun, and
hear many words stabbed at the air.

No one
knew who the voices belonged to. No names, no histories. Simply Kunroc. This was the haunting of demon
street. And the gravestone to this buried suffering was that great, monstrous
tree, that tree that, when the moon was right, could drive men mad.

It stood
like a warning, yet it taunted. It lured. It said come.

You who think you know fear, come touch
my trunk. You who think you know pain. You who think you have acquainted
sorrow. You who are not afraid of demons. Touch my trunk and see.

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About Me

My name is Jeff. I am a writer of words, and a servant of King Jesus. Lover of good books, great coffee, dear friends and sunshine, living in a world forged by words, in a land spun from golden summers and grey winters. I see things differently, and I write what I see.